Buzz Archives: General

UK gov’t draft guidelines propose that all British government sites adopt web standards. Recommendations include: use HTML to structure the document, not style it; use CSS for layout; don’t use browser-specific scripting methods; validate against a DOCTYPE; and others that help ensure accessibility. Cheerio! (Hat tip: Matthew Farrand.)

This month's Educational Technology Review from the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) covers technology and accessibility. The offerings include two articles discussing policy and legislation pertaining to Web accessibility compliance by educational institutions.
Hat tip to Kathy Cahill from the MIT Adaptive Technology (ATIC) Lab for pointing ...

Smooches to the true believers who flooded The WaSP’s in-box this a.m. In the interest of efficiency: the old Browser Upgrade campaign has been redirected to its new home here, an earlier problem with the RSS feed has been fixed, and we’re cognizant of a horizontal scrollbar in IE5.x/Mac that ...

Today the O'Reilly Network features SVG On The Rise, a thoughtful article on the strengths of the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a standards-based alternative to Flash. Be sure to read the section entitled “Why SVG fits into the Web.”

WaSP Owen Briggs has posted 264 screenshots demonstrating text sizing problems and failures across IE, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape. Executive Summary: When trying to make text accessible, even the workarounds to the workarounds fail in some of our best browsers.

One community of web users that you probably don't know about unless you're one of them is the home-improvement culture. Improving your home is tremendously reference-intensive: you're always looking up mildew-resistant paint or miter saw kerf tolerances or lag bolt length tables, and the Web is a boon.
Everybody paints, ...

Recent Buzz

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.

HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.

WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.

Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.

Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.